September 2009 – Page 10

A Special Needs Mom

As I’m blogging here, I’m also listening to the feminist blogger panel from the Netroots Nation. They made me smile as they discussed the “Where Are the Women Political Bloggers” ruckus from five years ago. Five years in the Internet is like dog years, so their chat made me feel very old indeed. One of the panelists said that one flaw in the feminist blogosphere today is that it is rather homogeneous. While the issues that the feminist blogosphere covers are extremely important, she said, issues and concerns of women from other communities also deserve attention.

As I wrote in my Intro post, my experience of being a mother helped to awake my inner feminist. But I’m more than a mom. I’m a mom of a child with special needs.

When I first started blogging, I was primarily a mommyblogger. When my son turned two, I wrote a post that described my boy as a serious character who hadn’t yet learned to talk. Two of my readers e-mailed me and urged me to get him evaluated for autism. To tell you the truth, when I first got these e-mails, I was outraged and horrified. How could they diagnose my child on the basis of a three paragraph post? Yet, I did as they suggested. State social workers came in and evaluated him. He qualified for speech therapy. At that time, he changed from a so-called “good baby” into a frustrated, miserable toddler. He screamed all the time. No babysitter wanted to be near him. My mother would get her feelings hurt, because he withdrew from her kisses, so I didn’t have help from her either.

The next three years were very difficult. He first learned to communicate with sign language, and his speech gradually improved at age four. Even though he mysteriously learned to read at age three, there were so many more things that he couldn’t do. He was tossed out of one pre-school, and I cried in the parking lot. I put him in a daycare for a couple hours a day for socialization, but they tried to eject him also, because he wouldn’t answer their questions and because he kept trying to run out of the room. They finally agree to keep him for ten hours a week, if I paid $1,000 a month on top of tuition for a one-on-one aide.

And then there was all the paperwork and forms and bureaucracy to get him services. It was a full time job to have the school system or the insurance system pay for his therapy. All the books and literature was screaming at me to get him therapy FAST or else he would be mute for life, but those institutions moved so slowly and so inadequately. I tried to continue my research in odd hours of the day or on weekends, when my husband came home, but it was difficult.

I had recently moved to a new community, where I had no friends. I couldn’t make friends with the other parents from daycare or nursery school, because nobody wanted a playdate with my kid. I was chained to the therapy schedule and couldn’t even leave the house much.

Today, things are much better. Ian is finally in a good school. It’s a public school that is specifically aimed at kids like Ian, but it’s out of district. The school system isn’t happy about this major expense, so I’m always worried that they are going to bring him back and throw him in the class for troubled kids. Ian has improved so much. His speech still isn’t age appropriate, but it’s adequate. He’s still advanced academically. And he’s just a great all-around kid; he makes me ridiculously happy.

There are millions of women who are parents to children with special needs. One out of 94 boys in New Jersey have the same problem as Ian. It is incredibly difficult to work when you’re dealing with bureaucratic red tape, with therapy schedules, and with phone calls from schools telling you to get your kid THAT MINUTE. It is extremely expensive, because so much therapy isn’t covered by schools or by insurance. Often women are doing this alone, because the stress of raising a special needs kid can lead to divorce. 80 percent of parents of autistic children get divorced. It is lonely.

While I wouldn’t trade my experience with Ian for anything, I could have really used a hand in those early years. Schools and health insurance companies have to take responsibility for therapy and childcare; they can’t keep pointing fingers at each other. There needs to be more support within communities. Families, and specifically women, can’t be impoverished by their caretaking responsibilities.

Can You Re-segregate an Already Segregated School System?

So, as I think I mentioned in passing, Nashville’s school system is embroiled in a huge lawsuit in which it’s contended that the city conspired to resegregate the public schools, which would then have the foreseeable consequence of putting a lot of black kids in a lot of shitty schools (though the other truth is that there are already a lot of black kids in a lot of shitty schools in Nashville).

As you can probably guess, Nashville’s school system was segregated prior to Brown. After Brown, white people mysteriously began loving private schools. Or the suburbs. Or homeschooling. And the public schools came to be predominately African American and, as they were neglected, predominately poor and African American.

This is not to say that there aren’t white kids in Nashville’s public schools, though, and there are even some schools with large white populations. And some very good schools in the Nashville system.

And then there was busing.

Busing has been a mixed blessing here in Nashville, at least from where I’m sitting. It has allowed some kids in bad neighborhoods access to better schools, but not all. It has not had the effect of bringing improvement to all schools and we still have situations where predominately black schools are predominately the worst schools in our system. It has also hurt neighborhoods and neighborhood cohesion. Parents of bused students have complained that busing makes it hard for their kids to participate in after-school activities. And parents of bused students complain that it is very difficult to participate in their child’s school life if they work and the kid’s school is out of the neighborhood.

And it also just seems weird that kids don’t go to schools near where they live. But that’s just me.

And, of course, there are all the racial undercurrents you can imagine.

So, the idea was to return to the neighborhood school model, with kids attending schools they could walk or ride their bikes to, in the hopes that parents in those neighborhoods would then return their children to the public school system, if they were not already in it.

It’s hard to over-emphasize how important getting people to put their kids back in public school is for the well-being of our public schools. It means powerful parents and parents with money who can make things happen being invested in our public school system.

It means, frankly, getting middle and upper-class people, who are predominately white, to put their kids back in the public schools.

It should be said, at this point, that a lot of parents send their kids to private schools in Nashville now, of all races. If you can afford to do it, the conventional wisdom is that you do, at least for high school, if not sooner. And while it might be racist why our school system sucks (and I believe it is institutional and codified and generational), our school system does suck, in general (though there are some very bright spots).

It is hard, very hard for me to blame parents for putting their kids in private school if they can afford it.

But I also know that, if they don’t start putting their kids in public schools, our public schools are going to have a hard time improving.

So, what do you do? Neighborhood schools are supposed to be a way of luring these folks back.

As you can imagine, though, poor black people are convinced that, once all their kids are stuck in the poor black neighborhood schools, those schools are going to get short shrift.

Last year, when the city tried to sell this plan to the people, they promised that they would dump tons of money and resources into the poor, black schools.

We just recently learned that some kids in these schools don’t have text books and we’re a month into the school year. When the city had to explain itself to a judge, our argument was that it’s not that we’re picking on the black schools, it’s just that we’re incompetent in general.

Not a glowing recommendation for private school parents to pull their kids out of private school, exactly.

So, it feels like an impasse. It may be that the economy starts to take care of some of this–that more middle class families will have to take their kids out of private school in order to make ends meet, that neighborhoods become more integrated as financial pressures force people to move closer to work, etc.–but I don’t know.

Even if everyone were to wake up tomorrow free from racist ideologies, we’d still have this problem of folks who can afford it putting their kids in better schools than most of the Metro schools and the kids who are left in public school suffering because of it. It’s one of the lasting legacies of racism that we all have to live with.

As one of our city council members, Jerry Maynard, says, “As a city, we’ve already lost.”

Being Trans Is A Worldwide Thang

A TransGriot post I wrote July 27, 2009.

One of the things that I love about the Net and compiling TransGriot is that it consistently reaffirms for me that I have brothers and sisters all over the planet.

It reminds me that no matter what corner of Planet Earth we call home, we transpeople deal with the same basic issues of fighting for our human rights, dignity and self respect. I’m reminded that we have wonderful cisgender allies who support us in our struggles as well.

One of the fringe benefits is that some of my international sisters like Pau Fontanos in the Philippines or Leona Lo in Singapore have become my friends. I’m looking forward to meeting many others if I’m blessed to one day resume my Air Marshal traveling days or they cross my path here in the States.

But whether the Forces of Intolerance want to admit it or not, transpeople are part of the diverse mosaic of human life.

We have also reached the tipping point that all oppressed peoples soon reach.

Transpeople are fed up with having our human rights trampled upon by cisgender people desperately trying to prop up their specious fundamentalist religious beliefs, their failed political agendas and personal prejudices.

We want the same things cisgender peeps want. To borrow from the United States’ Declaration of Independence, we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As we courageously stand up and fight for our rights, we also find that it’s liberating and powerful as well. We move beyond the shame and guilt over being trans and proudly embrace that part of our identities.

We transpeople simply want the ability to live our lives peacefully in our various homelands, pursue our versions of happiness, want a fair shot at gainful employment, a roof over our heads, food to eat, and non-judgmental health care.

We want friends and family who love and care about us while maximizing the talents our Creator has given us for the benefits of ourselves and the various nations we reside in.

The Forces of Intolerance can delay, deny, resist and even kill us, but they will lose. The moral arc of the universe is bending toward worldwide justice for transpeople.

I hope I’m blessed to live long enough to see that day.

What I Wish People Knew About Cancer

I feel funny writing this this because I feel like I’ve said and written so much about my mom’s cancer diagnosis and fight over the last year. Yet people still don’t get it. Cancer, I mean. And in all fairness why should they? Is it because by 2010 cancer will be the leading cause of death around the world? No, it’s much more mundane than that. You should get it because cancer has touched someone you know or someone you love, maybe even you.

There is a lot that people don’t know and understand about cancer. I thought I knew a lot about cancer. But until you or someone you love more than life itself is battling it, you don’t know shit. For me, that person is my mom, and she’s fighting for her life. There is still so much I don’t understand about cancer, but what I do know is out of a need to support my mom. And while the cancer hasn’t invaded my body, it has taken over my life. I won’t speak for other caregivers, but right now, my life revolves around my mother’s cancer. Everything else comes second, third, fourth, etc. From when I go to work (or whether I go to work at all), to whether I go home at night to see my husband, to how much I eat or I sleep, everything is impacted by cancer. I go to bed hoping for a peaceful night’s sleep, but I worry that my mother will need me, and that she won’t be able to sleep. I keep my cell phone with me at all times now, taking it to the bathroom, putting it by my head when I go to sleep in case something happens. This isn’t a rollercoaster. No, it’s more like a see-saw. The ups-and-downs are fast, constant, and sometimes even vicious.

It’s traumatic. From diagnosis through treatment and recovery, fighting cancer is harder than anything I’ve ever known. It’s not any one thing, it’s everything. Every blood test, rude staff member, doctor’s visit, and new medication just adds to the strain. It takes a toll on your body which forgets how to sleep or eat normally. It wears out your heart, which feels like it’s shattering into thousands of pieces, and just when you think you’ve collected all the shards to put it back together, it breaks again. It fucks with your mind. You struggle to hang on to thoughts, put thoughts into words. You fight for sanity in the midst of emotional chaos. And as much as people try to understand, empathize and support you and what you’re going through, they can’t. Cancer is its own world, and it can feel pretty lonely here.

Self-care. People are constantly saying, “Take care of yourself.” But what do they mean by that? I mean, I assume that they are well-intentioned. And yet, that “Take care of yourself” always leaves me puzzled. First of all, I’m not convinced people mean it when they say it. It’s filler, just something to say, like when people ask you, “How are you?” and you say, “Fine.” It’s a ritual. You know what you are supposed to say. That doesn’t mean you mean it. The other issue is that one person’s idea of taking care of yourself may be different from what you really need to restore yourself. For me, sleeping in my bed, being with my husband, spending time away from my mom, not carrying my cell phone around with me at every moment would all be ways of taking care of myself. Yet if I said that out loud, people might judge me and think I’m selfish. And really, what right do I have to ask for those bits of self-preservation? Finally, if I’m going to be honest, how can I possibly take care of myself when my mother’s fighting for her life? If I really did what I needed to take care of myself, I would have little left over for my mom right now. And frankly she needs me more than I need me.

Then there’s cancer fatigue. You are tired of thinking about it. People are tired of hearing about it. Mom is tired of dealing with it. We all just wish it would go away. Everyone is exhausted from months and months of providing physical and emotional support. We are desperate to regain some normalcy, but cancer is that elephant in the room that won’t be ignored. So what do you do? I’m not so sure, since this is where I find myself now. I remind myself of how far my mother has come in this last year. I tap into my extensive support network that has held me together all this time. I try to think about things other than cancer. I try to reclaim pieces of my life, the life I created for myself with my husband. And when all else fails, I call my best friend. Her father is in the last stages of his cancer fight. We speak the same language. We understand what the other is going through. We cry. We rage. And then we pull ourselves back together because our parents are depending on us.

So when people ask me how I’m doing or what’s going on, these are the things I want to tell them. Because this is what my life is about now. Cancer.

Open Thread: the Obama Speech

What did you all think? Discuss in the comments.

For those who haven’t seen it, CSPAN has it here.

Policy Proposals: The Social Security Credit

A couple of months ago, I asked my readers what they thought were the key issues around politics and parenthood. It was very interesting how wide ranging their policy proposals were. Their proposals hit on limiting work hours, increasing the time in school, having more walkable cities, and having a more equitable school system. And all this makes sense. Parents, and in particular women, are burdened with long commutes, mediocre after-school programs, the pressure to buy an expensive home in a town with a good school system, and 6:00 meetings.

Today, I’m going to point to various policy proposals that could improve the lives of mothers.

I focused on the problems that moms in the workforce face yesterday, but many moms work at home taking care of their children. Raising kids is work. The problem is that they receive no compensation or social security credits for their work. One proposal calls for mothers to get social security credits for parenting.

Mother Ought To Have Equal Rights or MOTHERS is a DC group that advocates for the rights of mothers. I’ve subscribed to their newsletter for many years. They explain the social security credit proposal.

They point out that motherhood is the number one predictor of poverty in old age. One-third of women over 64 live in or near poverty. Nearly 53% of women depend on Social Security to protect them from poverty. While some estimate that the value of caregiving in the US at 1 trillion dollars, that caregiving earns you a big fat zero on you Personal Benefit Statement.

They propose that women who are full-time caretakers of children under six or a sick family member should receive a Social Security credit equivalent to a $16,000 per year job. I think this number is incredibly low. Some estimate that a stay at home mom (SAHM) provides services that would cost over $100,000 if done by others. Regardless of how one calculates the worth of at-home caretaking, it has to be larger than zero.

This Social Security benefit would primarily benefit low-income women. It might only boost their yearly benefits by $418, but I think that this would be an important first step towards recognizing the value of parenthood.

The Women of Country Music

I have to tell you, as much as I like country music and as much as I sit around and piss and moan about how great it used to be, it’s sometimes very difficult for me to listen to the women of country music. It’s almost a relief that the industry is turning itself into a landing pad for girls that could have been on the Disney channel and washed up rockers, because you don’t have to turn your face too far towards the past before you hear songs that make you realize that “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman” is about the understatement of the century.

I was at the International Country Music Conference this spring and one of the presenters gave a talk about Patsy Cline’s reception in her own home town. If I were to tell you now that there’s opposition to preserving her home and making a museum because of how “trashy” she was, do I even have to tell you that they booed her and made her cry even after she was one of the most famous women in the country? And yet, god damn it, if she didn’t crash a parade in her own home town, her and her band, at the end of it, in her fancy car, driving like they belonged there. Which, of course, they did.

Still, it breaks my heart.

Or the other day someone was talking about how Loretta Lynn’s dad married her off at thirteen to her husband, Mooney, with advice about how to beat her to keep her in line. In Mary Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s book, Finding Her Voice, Lynn says, “After we had kids of our own, Doo [another nickname of Mooney’s] would take a belt to me as quick as he would to one of them,” and “It’s funny how it’s the old hurts that never heal.”

Of course she also said, “He never hit me one time that I didn’t hit him back twice.” But to me that sounds like bravado. But hell, so is getting in your car and joining a parade you’ve been clearly excluded from. Bravado doesn’t exclude action, I guess.

There’s another moment in Finding Her Voice, when Lynn is talking about getting grooming tips from Cline.

“You know, for years my husband wouldn’t let me wear makeup or cut my hair,” Loretta said years later. “To shave my legs, I had the children watch at the doors and the windows in case he came home. He didn’t want it, wouldn’t allow it. But I wanted to do just like Patsy Cline did, to be as pretty as her.”

I’m sitting here right now with legs I haven’t shaved in a week, hair I haven’t cut in a year, and no makeup. And, to me, that’s symbolic of my ability to buck certain gender norms, to have a little freedom from what’s culturally expected of me. But how can there be any doubt that being able to wear make-up and do your hair and shave your legs was a profound symbol of independence for Lynn?

Growing up, I didn’t feel poor. I thought we were middle class. We weren’t the richest folks in the towns we lived in. We weren’t the poorest. But going to college was a revelation about just where I stood in the pecking order, a very unfun revelation. And when I was 27, I got a raise that meant I was making more than my dad made when I was a senior in high school. And I was eating rice for dinner. It’s true that he didn’t have to pay for housing, but I didn’t have three kids.

I don’t know how to explain it, but it threw me for a big loop–making more than my dad and still struggling to get by. It made me feel like he and my mom had sheltered us from a lot, especially about how dependent our whole family had been on my mom working.

And I always thought I would get married to a man I hated.

I know that’s a strange thing to say out loud, but it’s one of the things you learn, if you spend a lot of time in church kitchens (and if you’re a girl of any age and your family was active in the church, back in my day, it meant you were going to spend a lot of women-only time in church kitchens), is that the era of 1974-1996 was full of smart, funny, articulate women who had given birth to your friends, who were tied, through marriage to men who were ruining their lives.

None of these women were feminists.

In fact, that was often very clearly articulated, not only in the familiar “I’m not a feminist, but…” formation, but also in the “Well, I’m not a man-hater like those feminists, but…”

The feminist monster gave room for women to talk about the kind of stuff that would just tear your heart out and to try to figure out what to do about it.

And the women they listened to on the radio, so many of them those great women of country music, seemed to help them make it through, which, to me, feels like a very feminist thing.

I want Loretta Lynn to be a great feminist hero. But I get why she wouldn’t call herself a feminist. Not only because the things that helped liberate her felt like ways to keep me stuck, and visa versa, but because being able to say “I’m not a woman’s libber” gave her a little wiggle room to act like one.

Why Black Transgender Role Models Are Important

A TransGriot post I wrote in April 2009.

Wyatt T. Walker wrote in a December 1967 Negro Digest article, “Rob a people of their sense of history and you take away hope.”

So when I stated that I wish I’d had pioneering transgender role models to look up to of African descent growing up like white transwomen have with Christine Jorgensen, April Ashley, and Phyllis Frye, I was speaking not only from a personal frame of reference, but from a historical one as well.

Yes, those people and many others have wonderful qualities that anyone can admire and emulate. But they also have in common the fact they are white.

That hasn’t changed even though there are three African-American transgender people who have Trinity Awards on their mantels. That hasn’t changed even though there are countless examples of transgender people of color stepping up, being intimately involved in shaping the history of this community and blazing trails such as the Alexander John Goodrums and Roberta Angela Dees of the world.

I’m lamenting the history that either hasn’t or is just beginning to be told.

The point is that a young Euro-American transkid always has people representing them that affirm, reflect and share their cultural heritage. They log into computers for information on transgender issues, and the websites and the history they tell about the community disproportionately reflects them.

Go to the library or search for books on transgender issues, and there’s a plethora of books, be they fiction or non-fiction, written from their point of view. They even see themselves reflected in the few movies and TV shows that have been done with transgender characters in them.

Now if you’re a person of color, it’s a different world.

Black transwomen have been whitewashed out of the transgender community narrative despite playing major roles in crafting it. We’re rarely interviewed by the MSM, have books written by us, about us, or for us, asked to speak at colleges on transgender issues, or reflected in the predominately white middle-upper middle class leadership ranks of the community.

Don’t even get me started talking about the images of African descended transwomen.

So when people consider me a role model or tell me they’re honored to talk to me, I realize the seriousness of it. It’s something I wish I’d had growing up, and it’s the same lament shared by current day transwomen now in their twenties and thirties.

It’s important in any marginalized community, especially as a transperson of color to have role models that share your ethnic heritage. They give you a concrete example of the fact that you aren’t alone for starters. Their existence lets you know they are proud to be who they are, a roadmap to living your own proud life and the strength to persevere against adversity.

It also lets you know that you have a valued history that we have an obligation to defend and build up to greater heights. It also gives you the sense that you are another runner in the relay race of life and it’s your turn to pick up the baton and carry it forward.

That has what’s been denied us through intentional and unintentional whitewashing of transgender history, our community being disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS and taking the brunt of the hate violence directed at transgender people.

It has also served as Wyatt Walker’s quote states, taken away our hope.

It’s a negative pattern that needs to be reversed, and it starts with us. We have to claim and fiercely defend our history, trumpet our accomplishments, and document what’s happening for current and future generations to read as well.

I want future generations of cisgender people inside and outside my African descended community to know not only what Alexander John Goodrum, Roberta Angela Dee, Dionne Stallworth, Kylar Broadus, Dawn Wilson, Dr. Marisa Richmond, Lorrainne Sade Baskerville, some transgender blogger who’s the 2006 IFGE Trinity Award winner and many others accomplished in their time here on Earth to build this community, it’s important for future generations of transkids to know this as well.

The Obstacles to Work

After I had spent far too long in graduate school and finished my dissertation, I should have been ready to go on the market for a full-time position. Instead, I ended up taking various part-time jobs that paid so poorly that my babysitter ended up making more money that I did. Some of the problems that I faced were specific to academia, and I won’t go into those issues today. But many of the problems that I faced, millions of moms also deal with.

Childcare is too expensive. In my case, a full-time teaching position would not have covered childcare for two children in Manhattan. Yes, Manhattan is expensive, but even outside of Manhattan, childcare is very expensive. My friends report spending 30% to 50% of their combined family income on childcare.
Many childcare options are simply inadequate. Daycare ratios vary greatly from state to state. In New Jersey, the state mandates that there must be a 10:1 ratio for two year olds. Anybody who has ever parented a two year old knows that one toddler is a handful. I certainly could never handle ten of them.
Even when the kids are old enough for school, things are still complicated. Schools end at 3:00. There are parent-teacher conferences and spring breaks and the whole summer vacation that conflict with a regular work day. The workplace isn’t happy about time off from work and, again, childcare programs aren’t always great.
Most workplaces expect their workers to be there at a minimum of 9 to 5. They aren’t that happy with parents who have to leave suddenly, because a child is puking in the lunchroom or because of a bump on the school yard.
Many of us don’t have that support system to help out when emergencies occur or even to step in when we’re too exhausted to make dinner. I’ve been lucky enough to live near my mom who’s helped out more times than I can count, but that’s not typical. Americans are more mobile than in the past and don’t always live near extended families. And the grandmothers have their own lives and don’t want to be tied down to the home anymore.
Men are certainly better than they used to be. I can’t imagine that there are many men who are as helpless as my dad who hasn’t done a load of laundry since 1964. But there’s still room for improvement. The burden of parenting still falls largely on the shoulders of the women, who after a full day in the office must pick up the child from daycare, make dinner, do homework, do a load of laundry, and pick up the dirty socks in the living room. My husband and I co-parented for a year when my first son was born, and that experience really helped us set up good patterns. But his job demands a lot of him. He’s gone for 12 hours a day. Someone has to make the kids food and do homework with them.

These problems are everyday discussions. My neighbors gripe about these matters at the busstop. My friends from graduate school have either given up finding work or have chosen less demanding careers.

Careers aren’t for everyone. Not everybody has a job that really makes them fulfilled. In fact, it’s probably a tiny minority that has that privilege. However, many families need two incomes to survive these days. They need two jobs for basics like a car, a house, and access to a good school. It’s for this reason that we have to reduce the burdens on families and women in particular.

Month: September 2009